Rumi's reed: the lament of separation

The previous article read in Persian Attar's poem of the birds; Rumi names Attar in the sixth book of the Masnavi. This one goes to Konya, in Anatolia, with a poet who also wrote in Persian and is read today all over the world: Rumi. I read in Persian, in the text published by Ganjoor, the 18 couplets that open the Masnavi, and the passages of the book where the word "alchemy" appears. I downloaded the whole book to count and search it. Each translation of mine I checked against that of Ahmed Avni Konuk, a Turkish scholar who translated and commented on the Masnavi line by line. What I did not read, I say at the end.

Who Rumi was, and the names

According to the English Wikipedia, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad was born in 1207 and died in Konya in 1273. The family came from Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, and fled west before the Mongol advance; after passing through several cities it settled in Konya, in the Anatolia of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum. Hence the name used in the West: Rumi, "the one from Rum", "the Roman", because that land had belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire. In Konya, meeting a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, changed everything, and with Shams's disappearance the poetry began.¹

The Persian Wikipedia adds something about the names: during Rumi's lifetime the names used were "Jalāl al-Dīn", "Khodāvandgār" and "Mowlānā Khodāvandgār"; "Mowlavi", "Mowlānā" and "Rumi" are epithets used centuries later. Today Iran mostly says Mowlavi, and Turkey, Mevlânâ. Almost everything was written in Persian: more than 61,000 couplets, against more than a thousand lines in Arabic, a dozen in Turkish and about twenty in Greek; many of those not in Persian are doubted to be Rumi's.² The Sufi order founded after Rumi's death by followers and a son, the Mevlevi, the order of the whirling dervishes, had its centre in Konya and spread across the Ottoman Empire.¹

A dictated book

The Masnavi ("the couplets") has six books. According to Wikipedia, Rumi dictated them over twelve years to a disciple, Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabi, who had asked for a book people could sing; and Rumi took out a sheet with the first eighteen lines already written.¹ I counted the couplets in the Ganjoor text: there are 25,637, spread over six books (Wikipedia speaks of about 27,000; the editions do not agree).³ Wikipedia says it is often called "the Quran in Persian", and that for many Muslims only the Quran ranks above it.¹

The reed

The book begins with a command: beshnow, "listen".³

بشنو این نی چون شکایت می‌کند / از جدایی‌ها حکایت می‌کند — beshnow īn nay chūn shekāyat mī-konad / az jodāyī-hā ḥekāyat mī-konad

"Listen to this reed flute, how it complains: it tells stories of separations." The ney is the reed flute of Mevlevi music. In the next couplet the reed itself begins to speak: since they cut it from the reed bed, men and women have moaned in its lament. And the fourth holds the key to the book:³

هر کسی کو دور ماند از اصلِ خویش / باز جوید روزگارِ وصل خویش — har kasī k-ū dūr mānad az aṣl-e khvīsh / bāz jūyad rūzgār-e vaṣl-e khvīsh

"Everyone who is left far from their origin seeks again the time of their union." The reed weeps because it was separated, and its music is that weeping. The 18 couplets are in the block below, one by one, with Konuk's translation beside them.

There are two couplets this project cannot read without stopping. The fifth:

من به هر جمعیّتی نالان شدم / جفت بدحالان و خوش‌حالان شدم

"In every gathering I lamented; I became the companion of those who are unwell and of those who are well." Bad-ḥālān and khosh-ḥālān: literally, those in a bad state and those in a good state. And the sixth: "Each became my friend from what they supposed; no one sought my secrets inside me." Konuk translates it the same way: each, "from the side of their own supposition" (kendi zannı cihetinden).⁴ Everyone hears the reed, and each hears their own.

The eighth returns to an idea that has already come up on this path: "The body is not veiled from the soul, nor the soul from the body, but no one is permitted to see the soul." The word is dastūr, permission. In the article on Ghazali, the soul had neither measure nor quantity and explaining its truth was not permitted. Here it is not seen either. It is heard.

The prologue runs on to couplet 34 and closes with another image Ghazali already used, the mirror and the rust: "Do you know why your mirror reveals nothing? Because the rust has not been parted from its face." Konuk translates pas, rust.³⁴

Alchemy, again

In the six books, the word kīmiyā appears, alone or in compounds such as kīmiyāgar (alchemist), in 43 couplets.³ I read in Persian the nine of Book One, with their context and with Konuk's translation beside them. None of them teaches how to work metals: in all of them, alchemy is the image of something that transforms a person. Of God the text says: "makes alchemy", and through God ears became eyes and stones became jade; alchemy is also the gaze of the saints and companionship; and Ali, in the story of the sword dropped before an enemy, says to that enemy at the end: "you were stone, and alchemy made you a jewel".⁵ The clearest one closes the story of the man from Qazvin who wanted a lion tattooed on the shoulder and regretted it because of the pain of the needle:

هستیت در هستِ آن هستی‌نواز / همچو مس در کیمیا اندر گداز — hastī-at dar hast-e ān hastī-navāz / ham-chu mes dar kīmiyā andar godāz

"Melt your existence in the existence of the One who caresses existence, like copper in alchemy." The couplet before says: if you want to shine like the day, burn your existence, which is like the night; and the one after: you have gripped "I" and "we" with both hands, and all this ruin comes from two existences. Konuk translates it the same way: "kimyâ içindeki bakır gibi erit", melt it like copper inside alchemy.⁴ As in Ghazali, the alchemy is that of the person; here, what is transformed has to stop saying "I".

One detail shows that the editions do not agree. In the Ganjoor text, the wife of a Bedouin urges the husband to go and see the caliph of Baghdad, saying that "sitting with kings is like alchemy; where is there an alchemy like their gaze?". In Konuk's translation, that company is not that of kings but of the mukbil, the fortunate.⁴⁵ Either Konuk translated a text with another word, or understood it differently; I do not know. That is why I quote the Persian I have in front of me and say where it comes from.

The Rumi that circulates

The English Wikipedia says Rumi has been described as "the world's most popular poet" and that in the United States Rumi has been the best-selling poet in recent years; the English "interpretations" by Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies.¹ I did not read Barks, and I do not judge those versions. But part of what circulates under Rumi's name is not Rumi's, and that can be checked.

The most famous case is a poem that begins "Come, come, whoever you are… ours is not a caravan of despair". Wikiquote lists it among the misattributions and says it seems to be by Abu Saʿid Abu'l-Khayr, a Persian Sufi and poet of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and gives the Persian.⁶ I looked it up on Ganjoor:

باز‌ آ باز‌ آ، هر آنچه هستی باز‌ آ / گر کافر و گبر و بت‌پرستی باز‌ آ / این درگهِ ما، درگهِ نومیدی نیست / صد بار اگر توبه شکستی باز‌ آ

"Come back, come back, whatever you are, come back; though you be an unbeliever, a Zoroastrian or an idolater, come back; this door of ours is not a door of despair; though you have broken your repentance a hundred times, come back." The Persian does not speak of a caravan but of a door (dargah). Ganjoor places it among the quatrains Abu Saʿid quoted from other poets, that is, it was already circulating in Abu Saʿid's time, and Abu Saʿid died in the year 440 of the Hijra, around 1049: a century and a half before Rumi was born.⁷ Nor did I find it in Rumi: I searched the 1994 quatrains of the Divan of Shams published by Ganjoor and the six books of the Masnavi, and it is not there. Abu Saʿid, by the way, is no stranger to this path: Ghazali quotes Abu Saʿid several times in The Alchemy of Happiness, once in chapter 18 of the first heading.

Wikiquote lists two more that circulate as Rumi's: "We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us", which is, almost word for word, Thomas Browne (1643), and "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it", which comes from A Course in Miracles (1976).⁶ These two I did not check in their originals: Wikiquote says so.

What I could not read

I downloaded the six books of the Masnavi from the Ganjoor text to count and search, but I really read very little: the 34 couplets of the prologue (in detail, the 18 of the reed) and the passages of Book One where kīmiyā appears, with their context; those of the other five books I only located. I could not identify the edition Ganjoor follows. Of Konuk I read the translation on Wikisource (a transcription into present-day Turkish, with no declared source), not the commentary; the dates (1868–1938) are second-hand. Of the Divan of Shams I only searched its quatrains; I did not read its ghazals. I did not read Barks, nor Nicholson, nor any scholar of Rumi. And my Persian is a reader's, not a specialist's: if you read Persian and see a mistake, this Diary needs you to say so.

What we do with this

A reed that in every gathering becomes the companion of those who are unwell and those who are well, and that each hears from their own side. Without meaning to, it is a fair description of what happens in the Observatory: every light is someone who said how they were, and no one reads inside anyone. What can be counted are the voices, how many and at what UTC hour. The soul, as the eighth couplet says, is not permitted to be seen, and we do not try.